Setting Up a Blog

Setting Up a Blog

There are several important steps involved when setting up a blog. First you have to sign up with a web hosting service. This will be the place where your files are hosted so be sure you find a reliable company. It would be hard to subscribe users to your blog if it was consistently unavailable. Look for services that offer 99% uptime or better (even when 99% is guaranteed it is still around 4 days per year).

Next you need to choose a niche you want your blog to be about. In a nutshell, your niche should be something you are interested in and/or know information about that you can use in your posts. Also make sure you know your audience and that your niche is not too specific or not too general. The amount of revenue in your niche should really play no part in your decision, however, if you choose a niche that has no potential for making money, you guessed it, you’ll make no money.

Secondly, you need to choose a domain name. It’s best to buy a domain that ends with .com because .com domains are most commonly used and will be easier to remember. Do not make your domain name too complicated, try to make it as short as possible and avoid using hyphens because they tend to confuse people. Be as creative as possible, you need a catchy easy to remember domain name that reflects the niche of your blog.

After you have set up your web hosting and domain name you need to decide which software to use on your blog. There are many free and paid blogging services and they all have their advantages and disadvantages. Your best option is to use WordPress, not only is it the most popular and most commonly used software but it is very easy to use and there are plenty of themes and plug-ins to enhance the look and functionality of your blog. To download WordPress for free, visit wordpress.org.

Installing WordPress may take some time if it is your first attempt at installation, so plan accordingly. The next step is the best – choosing the design you will use. It is strongly recommended that you do not use the default theme because it is very common and your readers will recognize it from other blogs and know you didn’t take the time or expense to upgrade the look of your blog. There are many free themes available, simply search “WordPress themes” in Google. If you want to improve the originality of your blog then you might want to pay a professional designer to make a custom blog for your site, this will go a long way in showing you are a professional.

At this stage, you might presume that most of the hard work has been done when in fact the hard work has only just begun. You now need to make high quality posts on a regular basis. You should make daily posts to begin with to build up the amount of content on your site. You also need to start promoting your blog and gaining more traffic. There are many ways to do this but if your blog is filled with high quality content, the word will get out, the search engines will find it, and your blog will automatically build traffic and subscribers. At this point you can start thinking about revenue.